Just last month I tried Ross MacDonald's 1949 crime story The Moving Target, which marked the début of his series private detective Lew Archer. Everything about Target was solidly impressive: a twisty plotline, memorably hard-boiled narration and dialogue, characters both highborn and low, flawed to the point of contemporary tragedy. These same elements are found in the 1950 follow-up The Drowning Pool, which is still impressive and manages to deliver a moodier atmosphere and a story with even more shadows and skeletons.

Archer receives an office visit from a woman named Maude Slocum, and after some coaxing she reveals her problem: she has intercepted an anonymous note addressed to her husband accusing her of extramarital exercises. Fearing there may be more to come, Maude asks Archer to find the writer and deal with the matter. But she gives the detective a very short – practically strangling – leash: he is not to talk to any of her acquaintances as a detective and she won't answer whether the accusation in the letter is true.

Archer compromises, and introduces himself into Maude Slocum's moneyed world as a talent scout for a movie studio. Maude's socialite husband James is an amateur actor performing the lead in a new play by friend and director Francis Marvell at the Quinto Theatre. While eavesdropping on a rehearsal, Archer witnesses a behind-the-scenes struggle between handsome grifter Patrick Reavis and a teen girl who turns out to be Maude's daughter Cathy. Maude, James, and Cathy are all living on the estate of James's mother, Olivia Slocum, a wealthy woman who is not generous with allowances for anyone, personal or economic.

On the night of a house party, playwright Marvell pulls from a darkened swimming pool the lifeless body of matriarch Olivia, a woman who never went swimming and feared the water. Pat Reavis's cap is found in the bushes nearby, and Reavis himself had legged it off the property right at the crucial time, hitching a ride with Archer into town. The detective finds himself quickly enmeshed in an escalating series of events, as one death begets another and lives built on play-acting and lies bring brutal consequences.

For a story with water (and oil) at its heart, The Drowning Pool ironically develops through a calculated slow burn of plot and character. For the first third of the story, Lew Archer is less of an actor and more of a fly on the wall, observing his client's comfortable but unsatisfying lifestyle and the restlessness of those surrounding her. It is a quiet, introspective approach that I have heard MacDonald will continue to use throughout his series, with later entries emphasizing themes of social amorality and bankruptcy and minimizing traditional hard-boiled action. When the murder of Olivia Slocum kicks off events that bring Archer into conflict with Chief of Police Ralph Knudson and a corpulent oil magnate named Kilbourne (and his sadistic henchman Melliotes), the book's mood switches quickly from contemplative to grimly active. Before the story is finished, characters will be shot, burned, drugged, beaten, and tortured, all in the name of greed and vanity.

I think it is this shift in mood and plotting that makes me feel The Drowning Pool falls just a little short. MacDonald's writing here is excellent; he uses his main character's wary first-person loner detective viewpoint just as well (if not better) than Raymond Chandler does, and the fact that once more Archer takes a case that brings him face to face with petty people and moral decay immediately makes the reader simpatico with Archer's objectivity. It's the only way to escape getting poisoned yourself, by money or sex or power. But The Moving Target felt more balanced, maintaining its pace masterfully from start to finish. (I also enjoyed the concept of looking for an unloved and unworthy kidnapping victim more than looking into a family whose members assure mutual misery for each other.) Notably, it is Pool that most Internet readers agree is the superior of the two; there is an excellent review posted by Max Cairnduff on his site Pechorin's Journal.

One other detail: Ross MacDonald's writing is indeed so strong and enjoyable that I adopted a reading practice that I had never tried before. For this title, I found the audiobook online but gave myself a 50-page print book lead in the story. I would then listen to recent chapters, a couple at a time, as I read through the book, finishing the pages first and the audio account a close second. This was a really satisfying approach, as the audio let me revisit and appreciate those lines and plot twists as the story was still unfolding. And the lines and twists are worth the review, full of intelligence and cool observation. I end with this example – Max C. includes the same paragraph in his review – where Archer surveys Nopal Valley, a town that has "benefited" from a landscape-changing oil boom:

The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where the trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since 'thirty-nine or 'forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn't know what to do with itself at all.

I'm looking forward to the next Lew Archer crime story, The Way Some People Die.

It is an extraordinary paragraph isn't it? Interesting you didn't like this one quite as much as Moving. Way though I think is the one where for me McDonald really caught fire. That was where I thought he became more than just good hardboiled, but instead great hardboiled.

Hi Max -- I'm listening to the audiobook of The Way Some People Die right now, and will certainly experience the print version shortly thereafter. I'm glad to hear that you think highly of it!

As for comparing The Moving Target and The Drowning Pool, it likely comes down to symmetry and subverted expectations (in a good way) for me. The denouement of Target felt inevitable yet stinging to me, and the same could be said of Pool -- there certainly feels like something Oedipal/Electra-c in a classical tragedy style there, it just arrives in a different way. But both are immensely enjoyable genre reads.

I look forward to checking in with your site again and making notes of titles I should put on my reading list! All best -- Jason

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